Quick to Condemn, Slow to Retract

Last week, the RJC blog parroted the Hill’s Pundits Blog condemnation of the DSCC entitled “Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to keep Madoff money“. On that very same day, the DSCC announced that it would be donating all of the $100,000 in Madoff money to a trust set up for people who lost funds through Madoff. Though slow on the pickup, the Hill’s Pundits’ Blog which the RJC referenced has since issued an update. Will the RJC follow suit?

UPDATE: Within two hours of this posting, it seems the RJC has amended their original post.

Conquering False Fears About Obama and Israel

By Salomon Kalach

Senator Obama has been campaigning in Florida meeting with Jewish communities to convince them of his genuine support for Jews and Israel. It’s not an easy job. Misinformation and stereotypes have hardened and it will be an uphill battle, especially now that the Democratic party is still divided with the nominating contest still in progress.

But the battle becomes more than unfair when groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition cross the line and start using spin to scare people from sticking to their traditional political party. It definitely crosses the line when they use Israel in order to snatch away some Jews, especially when all three candidates are strong supporters of Israel. It crosses the line when President Bush addresses the Israeli Knesset and hints, not so subtly, that Obama is an appeaser. (Right, I forgot how his cowboy foreign policy of “with us or against us” has been really successful in creating a safer world and making the U.S. be more respected around the world.)

Can these groups really not come up with any other reason why Republican nominee John McCain would be a better president without bringing up Israel? Is their only hope scaring people away from the democratic party by tapping into one of the most sensitive corners of the Jewish psyche? If that’s the case, that is pretty telling.

But well, since they do want to focus on Israel, I decided to contribute my two cents by fighting back and trying to convince people why Obama not only poses no danger to Israel but could also be great. I wrote an op-ed on the Jerusalem Post on the issue (click here to read it). You can also read Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg here.

Huffington Post: McCain Backer Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God’s Will

McCain Backer Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God’s Will (AUDIO)
By Sam Stein
May 21, 2008 01:24 PM

John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”

He goes on: “Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said ‘I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.’ So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

“Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah writing — ‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,’ meaning there’s no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don’t let your heart be offended. I didn’t write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

The sermon, which was first posted by Bruce Wilson on his site, Talk To Action, adds another element to Hagee’s controversial stance on the state and history of Israel. It also may provide a new round of political headaches for McCain who has admitted that seeking out Hagee’s endorsement was a mistake, but still declared himself “glad to have” it.

A spokesman for Hagee confirmed the authenticity of the remark, which can be found at around the 1:08 mark of his sermon “Battle For Jerusalem.”

Since McCain secured the endorsement, both his campaign and Hagee have been pressed to explain a series of derogatory remarks the Reverend made about the Catholic Church, including his reference to the institution as “the Great Whore.”

Hagee has since apologized for those remarks. But his interpretation of the role of the Nazis could be harder to dismiss, in part because McCain and Sen. Barack Obama are expected to compete heavily over the Jewish vote come the general election, in part because McCain has said he admires Hagee’s commitment to Israel, but mainly because similar theories have found their way into much of the Reverend’s writings.

As Wilson notes, in his 2006 book “Jerusalem Countdown”, Hagee proposed the theory that “anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves — the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive.” He also wrote that “Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews.”

Hagee is considered, in many political circles, to be one of the most passionate and strident supporters of Israel. He has spoken at AIPAC conferences and leads the evangelical group Christians United for Israel. But his views of the country, while possibly shared by others in the evangelical community, can be, at times, startling. Holding to the belief that Armageddon will come to earth following the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Israel, Hagee has advocated an aggressive war against Iran and has opposed any Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank.

McCain, at least in the public record, has sought to thread the needle with the Hagee association: distancing himself from the controversial comment while reaping the political benefits of the Reverend’s endorsement. Appearing on ABC’s “‘This Week” in late April 2008, McCain criticized Hagee’s past remarks on the Catholic Church, but said that, “I admire and appreciate his advocacy for the state of Israel, the independence of the state of Israel.”

What Are We Watching?

By Josh Pasek

Every year, the Republic Jewish Coalition (RJC) shows time and time again that it puts partisan interests above Jewish concerns and that they relentlessly attack anyone with whom they disagree, sometimes using only half-truths and drastically misleading statements. As Jews, we have long since known the dangers of misinformation. Indeed, as the targets of the blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, we should know better than to spread half-truths and outright lies.

There is perhaps no better example than the RJC’s often conflicted relationship with Joe Lieberman. When Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, the RJC took out a full-page ad in the New York Times attacking him and attempting to link him to Louis Farrakhan (New York Times. October 5, 2000). Yet when Lieberman was challenged in the Connecticut primary by Ned Lamont in 2006, the RJC quickly used the opportunity to attack the Democratic Party and claim that “America and Israel [were] worse off” for his loss (http://www.rjchq.org/media/pics/lieberman.ad.jpg).

Republican Jewish Coalition Watch plays the critical role of documenting the inaccuracies and hypocrisies of the RJC. For each advertising campaign and email the RJC puts out, we attempt to catalog both accurate statements and misleading remarks. We attempt to document these statements by referring to non-partisan neutral sources.

Republican Jewish Coalition Watch is a project of the Young Democrats of America Jewish Caucus (YDAJC; http://www.jewishcaucus.org). YDAJC is an organization dedicated to building the young Democratic Jewish political community. YDAJC seeks to engage young democrats in issues of particular Jewish concern and to invigorate young Jews to engage in politics from a progressive Democratic perspective. YDAJC accomplishes this task through a combination of education, awareness, and social interaction, as well as political advocacy on issues of Jewish concern.

What Jewish Voters Should Learn From History

By Matthew Rozsa

Before Jewish voters consider buying into the rhetoric of the Republican Jewish Coalition, they might want to first consider the following historical facts:

1. The Republicans try to win votes through fear. It is a tactic that has proven very effective for them among groups ranging from blue collar voters (who became Reagan Democrats by voting against their economic self-interest on the basis of trumped up cultural issues such as gay marriage, school prayer, and rebellion against the Sixties counterculture) to closeted racists (for whom coded rhetoric on issues like law-and-order, affirmative action, and welfare was a boon in playing on racial fears). The strategy of groups like the RJC is transparently similar to the one that helped draw in so many others – i.e., they are attempting to use fears held by Jews on issues that are important to them as group (support of the State of Israel, concerns about anti-Semitism in this country) to win votes. Fortunately, Jewish voters have by-and-large remained loyal to the Democratic party despite these largely dishonest efforts.

2. The Democratic Party has a long history of Jewish support, having won a plurality of Jewish votes in every presidential election since 1924 (and winning more than sixty percent in all but two of those contests[1]). In large part this is due to the rise of the modern left-right split in American politics. In the days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the two political parties tended to draw voters based on geographic loyalties and non-ideological issues (such as tariff rates and civil service reform), Jewish votes tended to correlate almost precisely with the votes of the region of the country they inhabited. However, as the two parties gradually became more ideological in their division, Jews found themselves increasingly likely to support whichever party was more liberal on the major issues of the day. While neither party was especially liberal in 1924 (Jews preferred the Democratic John W. Davis solely because he was
less overtly xenophobic than Republican Calvin Coolidge, whose
immigration policies were widely viewed as being thinly-veiled
Jew-baiting), the nomination of Alfred E. Smith in 1928 firmly established the Democratic party as a left-wing organization in the modern sense of the term. From that day to this, the sharing of progressive values has caused the Jewish community to be a reliably Democratic voting group[2].

3. Yet there is more than shared liberal beliefs to link Jews to the Democratic party. Major milestones in Jewish-American history have been accomplished under Democratic presidents. There was the first Jewish Supreme Court Judge (Louis Brandeis), who was appointed by Woodrow Wilson in 1916; the recognition of the State of Israel, which occurred under Harry Truman in 1948; and the first Jewish ambassador to the United Nations (Arthur Goldberg), who was appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965[3]. Recent Jewish history is being made under the auspices of the Democratic party, most notably the fact that of the forty-three Jews in the 110^th Congress (the highest number to ever serve that body), all but five of them belong to the Democratic party[4]. Indeed, one can find Jewish closeness with the Democratic party dating as far back as the nineteenth century, from the preservation of Monticello (the estate of Democratic paladin Thomas Jefferson) by Jewish naval Commodore Uriah P. Levy, to the widespread Democratic condemnation of General Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous decision to expel all the Jews from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky during the Civil War (a condemnation not shared by most congressional Republicans of the time[5]).

Obviously the mission of this blog will not merely be to demonstrate the historical relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic party, but to show how the modern Democratic party is far friendlier to the causes important to the Jewish people than their Republican counterparts. Yet a firm understanding of history is important to any informed discussion on this subject.

---

[1] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewvote.html

[2] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewvote.html

[3] Reaching for Glory: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1964-1965, edited and with Commentary by Michael R. Beschloss

[4] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewcong110.html

[5] American Jewry and the Civil War by Bertram W. Korn